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Thursday, March 15, 2012

Chrome - The Browser of Surfing Champions

"I don't always browse the web, but when I do, I prefer Google Chrome"... In case you haven't installed it yet, the Chrome browser is quite powerful. Admittedly, I was not an early adopter of Chrome; but once I got on it, I was hooked.

Having been online since before the days of BBS's and 56K modems, I've ridden the wave of browsers from the revolutionary Mosaic browser, to the free academic Netscape browser, Microsoft's ubiquitous, yet "monopolistic" Internet Explorer, the open source Mozilla Firefox and now Google Chrome.

Graph demonstrating that each new browser rapidly takes a major market share and slow decline. (graph predates Chrome's launch)

Chrome is quite a different browser; in that it's actually a mini-operating system. It's even package on a stand-alone, low cost laptop called a Chromebook which are even rented on Virgin America flights. It's literally lightning fast in loading websites and has rock-solid stability.

Concerned about security? Internet Explorer has so many exploits that even on a fresh install of Windows XP, you can literally loose control of your computer by simply going to a single malicious website without clicking on a thing. Google, on the other hand, has put their money on it; recently they upped the ante by offering $1Million in cash to hackers that can find vulnerabilities in Chrome, I'm nearly tempted to try; but given the academic intellect put into this product, I think my chances are better in entering a casino.

Quick points about Chrome.

Incognito (Ctrl-Shift-N) instantly makes you anonymous.

Omnibox (aka Keyword/URL): Just type any words in the URL/address bar and it will search Google. They really don't want you to have to think about URLs.

Incognito Mode: a browser session that is free & clear of any past cookies, cache or history. Once you close it, the browser session is deleted. This is useful when you want to visit sites anonymously or just with different login credential; i.e. multiple sign-ons to GMail.com.

Tabbed Browser: Modern browsers support this; some people are still not familiar with using tabs. Get used to it and take advantage of the below hotkeys to browse like a champ (see list of useful hotkeys below).

Chrome Store: True to being an OS, there's a whole Chrome app store for web applications published to work with Chrome. Many of these are just basic websites, but make it easier to open and use versus remembering a bookmark.

No Fuss Software: Upgrades are done transparently; furthermore they are releasing improvements quite frequently; allowing users to get the most out of new internet advances like HTML5 features.

Tab Hotkeys

Alt - D

Highlights the address bar so you can enter a URL or keyword

Ctrl - N

New tab

Ctrl - Shift - N

Restore last closed tab (very useful if you want to bring back the page you accidentally closed)

Ctrl - Shift - T

Open Incognito browser window

Ctrl - W

Close tab

Ctrl - 1

Switch to first tab

Ctrl - [2, 3... 8]

Switch to second, third, nth tab.

Ctrl - 9

Switch to last tab

Ctrl - PgUp / Ctrl - PgDn

Switch to next or previous tab.

Ctrl + / Ctrl -

Enlarge Font or Reduce font size

Ctrl 0

Set font size back to normal.

Common Hotkeys

Ctrl - J

Open downloads

Ctrl - H

Open history

Ctrl - Shift - Esc

Clears history, cookies dialog box.

Advanced/Developer Hotkeys

Shift - Esc

Task manager; very useful to see the resources used per tab, like CPU, RAM Memory and network I/O. You can then kill any task or tab. This is a clear benefit of the Chrome OS.

Ctrl - U

View HTML source code

Ctrl - Shift - I

Developer tools; useful to see CSS style codes and the page hierarchy structure.